Asus prepares ‘Bearlake’ motherboards

Bearlake is Intel?s upcoming replacement for the current Broadwater 96x series of chipsets and is expected to arrive in the coming weeks. The main benefits of Bearlake are DDR3 and PCI Express 2.0 support. The vPro series will be named the Q35 and Q33 Express. High end chipsets will be dubbed the Intel X38 and P35 Express names while the mainstream parts will receive the Intel G35 and G33 names.

Asus is offering three boards dubbed the P5K, P5K Deluxe and P5K3 Deluxe. Both the P5K and P5K deluxe are DDR2 based while the P5K3 deluxe suports DDR3. Like previous offerings from Asus, the Deluxe model will sport a WiFi NIC, elaborate copper cooling, and an extensive accessory bundle.

In addition to the features provided by the P35 chipset itself, Asus has a few more unique features to offer including a new pure-copper cooling apparatus, ‘Stack Cool 2’ technology, AI Gear 2, AI Nap, Q-Connectors and other features common to Asus boards. Asus has also redesigned the I/O backplane and they’ve incorporated a new feature that tells users when an expansion card is properly inserted into a slot by lighting up an LED light.

Other manufacturers to announce new boards based around the P35 chipset include MSI and Gigabyte.